The letter from king Edward I to Pope Boniface VIII, dated 1301, is preserved among the Close Rolls in the National Archives. In it Edward gives his version of the history of relations between England and Scotland during a period when this was a thorny issue. Edward believed that the king of England had rights over Scotland while the Pope thought he had jurisdiction over Scotland and repudiated English involvement. The letter gives an account of the early history of Britain reminiscent of that found in Geoffrey of Monmouth.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Four focuses on intermarriage and incest, first tracing medieval understanding of these concepts in biblical tradition before examining contemporary evidence for intermarriage and incest in early medieval legal and historical texts. Origin legends expanded further to envision what might have happened after a foundational ancestor who emigrated alone or with a small band of followers arrived to the insular region. Women were necessary in order to preserve the population, and there were really only two solutions to the problem: intermarriage or incest. This chapter examines each of these motifs in turn, studying how they were introduced into insular origin legends and expanded to create different narrative possibilities for political commentary as the corpus grew.

The growth of origin narratives throughout a wide swath of literary and historical genres demonstrates their important role in constructing a particular vision of the present by linking it to a carefully constructed narrative of the past during the medieval period. It also underscores the intellectual connections that this book argues were widespread in the early medieval insular region. Such textual connections were not limited to the more comprehensive historical works which have formed the focus of this study. Local origin stories also drew on the same narrative patterns and motifs. The conclusion examines four brief dynastic origin legends that incorporate some of the themes explored in this book: the brief genealogical treatise of the Dál Riata known as Senchus Fer n-Alban / Míniugud Senchusa Fher n-Alban; the legendary piece of Uí Néill dynastic propaganda known as Echtra mac nEchach Muigmedóin; the legend of ancestral figure Cunedda and his sons expelling the Irish from Gwynedd which is embedded in the Historia Brittonum; and the story of legendary Danish ancestor Scyld Scefing from the opening lines of Beowulf. These narratives underscore the importance of movement within the corpus of insular origin material, even on a local level.

A key argument of this book is that it is impossible to separate the growth of any insular origin narrative from that of the larger corpus of historical writing which contained them. Chapter One presents the evidence for the textual connections between these works, while the chapters to follow analyse the implications of these connections. This chapter outlines the sources and later reuses of each major work under consideration. Specialists on individual texts and manuscripts will already be aware of many of these connections, yet broader scholarship on the early medieval period still treats so-called ‘Irish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Scottish’ literary and historical traditions as disparate. This chapter thus provides the ‘hard evidence’ for the extent to which the corpus of texts containing origin narratives influenced one another during the early medieval period. Early medieval authors were interested not solely in writing the story of their own people, but rather, in collecting the histories of the peoples of Britain and Ireland together. Chapter One overturns the common perception that the authors of these texts were working in proto-national isolation, instead revealing the textual connections that shaped the intellectual landscape of the early medieval insular region.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Three focuses on kin-slaying, first tracing the influence of the biblical legend of Cain and the classical legend of Romulus and Remus on early medieval authors before examining contemporary evidence for kin-slaying in early medieval legal and historical texts. As insular origin narratives expanded, their authors recognised the narrative need to explain ancestral exile. The idea that a foundational ancestor had committed the crime of kin-slaying was introduced via the Brutus story in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum and proved subsequently popular, as exile was theoretically the legal sentence for this crime. As a narrative motif, kin-slaying allowed a people to retain the prestige of ties to ancient dynasties while embracing political independence in the present moment.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Two focuses on exile, first tracing the influence of the biblical myth of Exodus and the classical legend of the Aeneid on early medieval authors before examining contemporary evidence for exile in early medieval legal and historical texts. The chapter argues that as the corpus of insular works containing origin narratives grew and developed over time, the concept of exile took on central importance. Arising from Gildas’s foundational description of Britain as an island on the outermost fringes of the known world, the centrality of exile to insular origin stories grew after the ninth-century Historia Brittonum introduced the influential legend that Britain’s founding ancestor was Brutus, an exile from Troy. From there, the concept of exile gained increasing thematic importance within insular origin narratives.

When writing their own histories and those of their neighbours, early medieval insular peoples sought to provide answers to some obvious questions. Who were their ancestors? Where did they come from? And why did they leave their homelands? Over the course of the early medieval period, a discourse of origin narratives developed within the insular region. By the time of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, an expansive origin legend had become attached to each of the four peoples who inhabited Britain and Ireland. This book explores the development of these stories in the early medieval period from (roughly) the departure of the Romans to the arrival of the Normans before turning to an examination of how they were treated by early modern chroniclers writing histories with a more nationalist bent. In the early medieval period, the corpus of insular origin legends evolved together to flesh out the history of the region. Individual origin narratives were in constant development, written and rewritten to respond to other works. Together, these legends were constructed not to form four distinct ‘national’ histories but rather to fill in the blanks of prehistory for the region as a whole.

In the ninth century, the Carolingian conquest of Brittany, together with a Europe-wide revival of learning, created a new interest in explaining Brittany’s past. Rival stories of Brittany’s British origins were set down by Frankish, Welsh and Breton scholars. The Bretons’ view of their own past was expressed wholly through the medium of hagiography, a considerable amount of which was produced during the later ninth and early tenth centuries: this allows us to gauge the nature of its authors’ links with the Insular world. The British origins of the founding figures of the Breton Church were proudly proclaimed despite a readiness to accept Carolingian authority; there seems to have been little real knowledge of the saints’ alleged sixth-century origins, but considerable opportunity to gather information contemporaneously from Wales and perhaps also from Cornwall and Ireland. The role of Llancarfan (in south Wales) in relaying information between Ireland and the hagiographers of Saint-Malo in Brittany is highlighted.